Chapter Fifteen
In 1999, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had been suffering from a chest infection, and though the usual treatments of antibiotics had been administered, her condition did not improve. […]
This was of no consequence to my bullies, though. By that age I was living between lessons in a dormitory, the pupils separated into independent ‘houses’ that competed with one another in sport and singing competitions […]
Naturally, free from adult condemnation or reprimand, they continued to mock her to my face, telling me that “it would be funny if she died” and reminding me as if in sincerity and the vulgar slang of the day that she was “still fit though” and thus “shaggable.” The worst culprits for this were Chris and Tim. Their horrible words left me shaken to my core and weary, damaged, appalled that they would be so weak and so feral as to, in effect, pass above me to insult my mother long distance, a sadly all too common line of child-on-child abuse that I have always considered extremely below the belt. […]
“Hello there! I’m Ben’s mum; I’m a fat, ugly Irish c**t!” My mother was still in her acute phase of healing in real life at this point, having just left the London hospital following her two-week window and in recuperation in Chelmsford’s Broomfield. It was not the worst insult I had heard from one of them over the cruel months, but it was enough. Something I had never felt before welled up in me, a piercing column of dark flame and red-hot rage filling my consciousness.
I slammed out of my desk and stared at him with pure hatred, not saying a word. Never before had I tackled a bully, but I knew my body was stronger, and I was now well over six feet tall, and besides, I was angry. Without a second passing, I reached out, grabbing him by the throat with my right hand and squeezing, and picked him up a little by the neck, pinning him to the wall of the cubicle. My fingers squeezed tight around his windpipe, feeling the warm flesh in my hand, that physical connection, his stiff surprise, and all the pounding intensity of full on contact aggression. Then, pushing him to one side, him yelping, his eyes wide in shock, spluttering and choking, I glanced over at the first-floor window, motioning that I was going to throw him out of it. “What the hell did you say!” I shouted at him, gritting my teeth, snarling in inchoate rage, “You’re the f**king c**t!!” and his struggling face writhed in panic, in total surprise and fear. Only then did I let go and heard him immediately say, and in fluster, “I’m sorry, Ben! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!” I had no more trouble with him on the matter after that.
By now, my anger had faded, still more melancholic by nature than aggressive enough to be able to defend myself adequately in the long run, a painful consequence of the years of torment and sorrow before. I felt awful that I had felt compelled to use swear words, especially words of that calibre, and, despite the circumstances of the incident, I remember taking what I had said to Confession with me at Our Lady Immaculate and what I had done, re-wording it to the priest a little to downplay Tim’s words, and the context of our fight, embarrassed and torn, feeling myself morally culpable, despite being in defence of my mother. […]
Knowing of this incident, the other boys ignored me instead of directly confronting me with their mockery and put-downs. They were never really my friends, and I knew then that I was never well liked, not even by the quieter, less popular pupils who could tolerate my company. I had shown them something in me that they had never seen before, and, perhaps unfairly, they distrusted me for it and considered me above all “really weird”, if not “a psychopath”, words of ignorance and judgement which have always hurt me. I never again had the personal necessity to physically engage a pupil at that school with my newfound rage. However, I was no better in confidence despite my defensive act, too used still to my long years of passively suffering violent attacks before that, and a sad, shy boy.
Time paced on slowly, and I moved on in my emptied, silent spaces, always lonely, watching happiness from the sidelines, already missing a world I had never been privy to. I just did my work when I could and slipped away, looking to the sky and the woods and the fields and pacing out alone down the bleak countryside tracks to the side of the river a mile off to lie by the soft banks of the water and cry, returning in the twilight, with no expression on my face.
______ 卐 ______
Editor’s Note:
In the first instalment of this series, I mentioned that a mudblood migrant raped Benjamin when he was six years old, the age at which he appears in this photograph. In that instalment, I didn’t include the photo because I posted another one: the location of the rape, which Benjamin visited many years later as part of his introspection and self-therapy.
On the 27th of last month, I moved from Yautepec to the neighbourhood where I spent the best years of my childhood and early adolescence and, alas, also my middle teens: when my parents began to treat me psychotically. My intention to return here was also self-therapeutic. In the photograph on the right I appear during the last year when I was very happy: the overt abuse at home hadn’t yet begun…